“… a car to delight the driver in you.”

Along with the other X-cars, the Buick Skylark was all new for 1980. Only the model name was carried over as the Skylark moved from rear-wheel-drive to front-wheel-drive and downsized yet again, losing about a foot and a half in overall length.

The Skylark name was a long-running and important one to Buick. 1953’s gorgeous limited production Roadmaster Skylark convertible was followed by the smaller Century-based Skylark convertible in 1954. In the middle of the 1961 model year, the Skylark name was reintroduced as a luxury trim of the Special compact. For 1962, the Skylark became its own model. By 1964, the Skylark had become its own model line and had moved to an intermediate size. The intermediate rear wheel drive Skylark would continue for three generations (with one slight interruption in 1973-74).

Like with every other 1980 X-car, the Skylark’s standard engine was GM’s Iron Duke 90 bhp 2.5 liter/151 ci inline four with a Rochester Varajet II two-barrel carburetor, paired with a four-speed manual transmission. Fuel economy was 24 city/38 highway by the day’s standards (21/34 by today’s measures). With a 14-gallon gas tank, a Skylark’s driver could expect a range of 350 to 390 miles with a 10% fuel reserve. 0-60 times for the Iron Duke are hard to find, but were likely around 16 seconds for the four-speed manual transmission and probably about 19 seconds (oog) with the optional ($337) three-speed automatic transmission.

Spending $225 to upgrade to the LE2 2.8 liter/173 ci V6 with a Rochester Varajet II two-barrel carburetor got you 115 bhp and a 0-60 time of a little over 13 seconds. Fuel economy dropped substantially to 20 city/28 highway with the four-speed manual transmission. Moving to the three-speed automatic transmission dropped highway mileage to 27 mpg.

Standard exterior and mechanical equipment on the $5,306 Buick Skylark sedan included front-wheel-drive, rack-and-pinion steering, front disc/rear drum brakes, and P185/80R13 fiberglass-belted radial-ply tires (a size now only marginally available) on 13-inch wheels. Inside, buyers got a no-cost choice of either a houndstooth cloth or a vinyl notchback front bench seat. A Delco AM radio with two front speakers and a windshield antenna was also included.

The $5,726 Skylark Limited included a distinctive hood ornament, wide rocker and wheel opening moldings, Deluxe wheel covers, and a gas strut under the hood. Inside, a choice of a Limited level brushed woven cloth or a vinyl notch back seat with a fold-down center armrest, door entry courtesy lights, a simulated wood grain instrument panel, a special acoustic insulation package, and a plush carpeted back window panel were present. Limited identification was, of course, included.

The $5,920 Skylark Sport Sedan included a specially styled grille, amber front park and turn lamps, front and rear bumper strips, black moldings, wheel opening moldings, Sport mirrors, smoked tail lamp lenses, a Rallye ride-and-handling package system, a larger rear stabilizer bar, and P205/70R-13 steel-belted radial-ply blackwall tires on Designers’ Sport wheels. Inside, the Sport Sedan included a Sport steering wheel and a black instrument panel with a voltmeter, a temperature gage, and a trip odometer.

Options & Production Numbers

The Skylark’s options list gives you a sense that Buick was trying to serve two masters. The base prices were affordable, but you could load the Skylark sedan up with thousands of dollars’ worth of options, bringing it close to a Century or a LeSabre.

Individual exterior and mechanical options for the Skylark included the Designers’ Accent paint treatment ($174), a Landau top, a long vinyl top, a Vista-Vent flip-open glass sunroof ($240), power steering ($164), power brakes ($76), and chrome-plated road wheels ($141). Inside, front bucket seats ($48), a 6-way power seat ($165), a full-length operating console, Cruise-Master speed control ($105), a tilt steering column ($75), air conditioning ($564), power windows ($189), and electric door locks ($123) were available.

Four Delco radios ranging up to an AM/FM stereo with a cassette tape player and a CB ($491) were available. Lower body sport stripes with a Hawk decal were available only for the Skylark Sports versions.

Buick sold 80,940 base Skylark sedans in the 1980 model year. Combined Limited and Sports Sedan sales totalled 86,948, with the vast majority being the Limited. The Skylark was 26% of Buick’s total production in 1980.

Despite an astounding nine recalls for the 1980 version, the Skylark’s yearly sales percentage declines were notably less than those of other X cars—by 1983, Buick was actually selling more Skylarks than Chevrolet was selling Citations. The fifth-generation Skylark sedan, which Buick called its “little limousine,” would continue through the 1985 model year and end up selling 729,523 copies over six model years.

The View From 2025

A few—but only a few—of the X-cars were saved, and Skylarks of this generation occasionally appear in the Hemming’s Motor News classifieds, on eBay Motors, and on Bring a Trailer.

Make mine Dark Red Metallic, please.

Other X-bodies I’ve written about in this blog included the 1980 Chevrolet Citation hatchback sedan, the 1981 Chevrolet Citation X-11 hatchback coupe, the 1982 Pontiac Phoenix SJ coupe, the 1983 Buick Skylark T TYPE coupe, the 1984 Oldsmobile Omega sedan, and the 1985 Chevrolet Citation II hatchback sedan.

“… a new philosophy about personal luxury cars.”

The seventh-generation Riviera debuted on November 14th, 1985. For a third and final time, Buick downsized the Riviera—this time to a 108-inch wheelbase and a 187.2-inch overall length. The size reduction (more than 19 inches shorter) made this generation the smallest and lightest of all Rivieras. Among the planning assumptions for the seventh generation model and its Eldorado and Toronado platform-mates was that gasoline would cost approximately $3.00 a gallon upon debut. Instead, fuel was going for around $1.19 when the three prestige coupes entered the market in late 1985.

In part because of the assumptions mentioned previously, there were no more V8s for the Riviera—from 1986 forward, the Riviera that had been V8 only until 1979 would now be V6 only. Also gone forever was the diesel V8, almost certainly less missed by buyers than the gasoline versions. Production moved to a brand new plant in Hamtramck, MI. Finally, the Riviera was also back to being coupe-only—the four-year experiment with the glamorous, attention-getting, and pricey convertibles was no more.

After many years that had some (sometimes many) choices, the only available powertrain for 1986 was the LG2 “3800” 140 bhp 3.8 liter/231 ci V6 with sequential fuel injection paired with a Turbo Hydramatic 440-T4 automatic transmission with overdrive. The LG2 was a version of the previous generation Riviera’s LD5 modified for transverse front-wheel-drive usage and was first seen as an option in the 1984 versions of the Buick Century and the Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. Though it was “just” a V6, the LG2 had the same power rating as the 1985’s base V8, making the substantially lighter “civilian” 1986 Riviera quicker than its 1985 equivalent. The 0-60 time was about 10 seconds, making the Riviera quite competitive in class.

Fuel mileage for the new Riviera was 19 city/30 highway by the day’s standards. With an 18.0-gallon fuel tank, the driver of a 1986 Riviera could reasonably expect a range of 370 to 415 miles with a 10% fuel reserve. This impressive range put paid to the reputation of Rivieras of years past, who were often said to “pass anything but a gas station”­—and sometimes had about 200 miles between fill-ups. The 1986 ended up with among the longest ranges of any Riviera, despite having a smaller fuel tank than most.

Along with its downsizing, powertrain, and configuration revisions, a change also came to the Riviera’s styling brief. Buick described the seventh-generation exterior as a “gentle wedge form” and paid far more attention to aerodynamics than with any previous generation (more advanced technology made these objectives more easily attainable). Led by William Porter, the division settled on its new Riviera look quickly—the final design for the new generation was recognizable even in renderings done many years earlier, in late 1980.

As might be expected with the far lighter weight (the Riv shed more than 500 pounds) and smaller engine, fuel economy was better than any Riviera before—or after. Perhaps more surprisingly, the available interior room was quite close to that of the sixth-generation cars, a sign of careful and skilled packaging design.

For the first time in its history, the presumed differentiator for a new generation of Rivieras was inside the car—not its exterior design. The Graphic Control Center included seven to ten microprocessors (depending on the particular options ordered) and a 3 x 4 inch touch-sensitive cathode-ray tube screen. This component was bleeding edge for publicly available technology in the mid-1980s and certainly not inexpensive to produce­—dealer cost for a replacement unit was said to be over $2,000. The Graphic Control Center was also easily a quarter of a century ahead of its time—probably not the right choice for the average Riviera customer.

Designed by Delco Electronics over several years with assistance from Buick engineers, the Graphic Control Center was prototyped in one hundred 1984 and 1985 Rivieras. In production form, it included diagnostic displays, a trip monitor, retained accessory power, and controls for the electronic air conditioning and sound system. Touching gauges brought up additional information, including a tachometer along with battery and coolant gauges.

The Graphic Control Center was heavily promoted in both the press and Buick’s sales materials—the 24-page 1986 Riviera brochure devoted its first four inside pages to it. At the time, Buick’s chief engineer, Dave Sharpe, told Popular Mechanics that the new Riviera targeted America’s young “technotypes.” From over a third of a century away, it’s quite unclear who he was talking about.

The 1986 Riviera had many new standard features: four-wheel power disc brakes were finally included on every example after having been an option for almost a decade. Another item newly standard on the seventh-generation Riviera was tungsten-halogen headlamps—first seen on a Riviera in the 1972 Silver Arrow III concept car and optional on production Rivieras since 1981. So was a high-mounted stop lamp—federally mandated for all 1986 automobiles and a faint echo of the fourth-generation Rivieras.

Every one of the 15 exterior colors was also new—even the Riviera’s black and white color formulations (both of which had been constant for at least a decade) did not carry over from 1985. The Riviera’s four Firemist colors were shared with Cadillac and Oldsmobile—but not with other Buicks as had been true in the fifth-generation cars.

Flies In The Ointment

From a marketing perspective, the 1986 Riviera was more than a foot shorter than that year’s Buick Regal coupe—whose base price of $10,654 was $9,177 less than the $19,831 that the supposedly senior coupe went for. A persistent rumor stated that Buick dealers were told not to place the Riviera too close to the similar-looking but even less expensive Somerset Regal coupe, which had been on their showroom floors since the beginning of the 1985 model year. As early as September 1985, Popular Mechanics pointedly queried, “why make an expensive car look like a cheaper model?”

As if that wasn’t enough, the Riviera’s size was also quite close to that of the LeSabre—traditionally the largest coupe in the Buick family, and now also front wheel drive. It also probably did not help that 1986 Riviera prices were up almost 16% over the 1985 version, even when accounting for inflation.

Due to these and other contributing factors, Riviera sales collapsed, declining 66% to 22,138—a painful state of affairs for General Motors, which the Riviera shared with its Eldorado (off 72%) and Toronado (down 62%) stablemates. Six years later, GM had now managed to duplicate the carnage that Ford had experienced with its 1980 downsizing. Notably, Ford Thunderbird, Lincoln Mark VII (the Continental name departed that year), and Mercury Cougar sales were all up for 1986, along with those of some of GM’s “junior” personal luxury coupes. The December 1987 issue of Special Interest Autos simply called it “the E-body disaster” and speculated that it was costing GM half a billion dollars a year in lost profits.

It seems clear that General Motors had utterly misjudged what the appeal of its new prestige coupe platform was to folks who might actually consider buying it. One can only wonder how many hundreds of thousands of future vehicle sales were lost as the revised E-body offerings for 1986 got buyers permanently out of the habit of buying big personal luxury coupes—what only one year prior had been over 181,000 high-profit sales. To add to the pain, a short but memorable star turn by a Riviera in the 1986 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Raw Deal featured a sixth-generation convertible—not a seventh-generation coupe.

The relatively few folks who did purchase a 1986 Riviera got a well-equipped car by mid-eighties standards. Standard exterior equipment included Soft-Ray tinted glass, cornering lamps, and an automatic power antenna. Mechanical equipment included power steering, a DynaRide four-wheel independent suspension with automatic level control, and 205/70R14 all-season whitewall tires on 14-inch wheels with Deluxe wheel covers. Inside, standard features included Electric Speed Control cruise control, a tilt steering column, a Limited steering wheel with cruise-control switches, electric door locks, and a Delco ETR AM-FM stereo with seek and scan, a clock, and four extended-range speakers. Interior trim and upholstery featured a full-length console with a floor shift, manual reclining cloth front bucket seats, and a six-way power driver’s seat.

One Package & Individual Options

The sporty T Type package (at $21,577, an additional $1,746 over the base Riviera) carried over its designation from the previous generation but lost its differentiating turbocharged V6—making it no quicker than any other Riviera. It did at least handle better than the average Riviera—the T Type’s 1986 guise included a Gran Touring suspension and P215/60R15 Goodyear Eagle GT blackwall tires on 15-inch aluminum wheels. T Type’s were only available with Flame Red, White, Silver Metallic, or Black exterior paint, and all featured gray lower accent paint.
Inside, every T Type included a leather-wrapped steering wheel with cruise control switches and the heavily-hyped Power Comfort six-way power bucket seats for driver and front passenger—with reversible cloth and leather center sections that attached with velcro. The Power Comfort seats included inflatable lumbar supports, electrically adjustable headrests, and double pivoting systems for the lower seatback. A little over 9% of Riviera buyers took home a T Type in 1986.

In addition to all that was newly standard, new options for 1986 included a keyless entry system (available mid-year), a heated outside drivers mirror, and the availability of lumbar support with the optional seats. The radio delete option no longer existed—every Riviera buyer was driving home for the dealership with some kind of factory radio. The number of options in 1986 was reduced to less than one-third of what it had been in 1985, as Buick worked aggressively to reduce build complexity—but removed much of the path to a truly personal Riviera.

The View From 2025

With the excellent support of the Riviera Owners Association, a few folks are collecting these early seventh-generation Rivieras. According to Hagerty’s valuation tools, a base 1986 Buick Riviera in #1/Concours condition is $15,500, with a more normal #3/Good condition car going for $7,600. Rivieras of this generation sometimes show up in the Hemming’s Motor News classifieds, on eBay Motors, and on Bring a Trailer.

Make mine Black Cherry Metallic, please. I know that means that the 1986 Riviera I want won’t be a T Type.

Other Rivieras I have written about include the 1980 S TYPE, the 1982 convertible, the 1984 T TYPE, and the 1989 coupe.

Most material in this blog entry was sourced from the unfinished Riviera Project.